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Comment by mtnGoat | Hacker News Reader

Do you think working at a FANG would make you a better developer? I’m sorry but I think that’s a bad expectation, hire from a startup if you want great developers, their span of control and influence is much wider. Most of us at FANG are pigeon holed into a very narrow topic, have to work with really annoying, slow and complex internal build systems. And write very little actual code. Also, unless you have global scale problems, a lot of the skills developed working at that level aren’t useful to smaller orgs and will just drive up costs. Dont look to FANGs for guidance is my advice.

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> Do you think working at a FANG would make you a better developer?

No, but I do expect any reasonably competently run company to figure out that the person they hired isn't actually able to do their job, especially after 7 years. I was also under the impression that this company actually did coding challenges as part of their interview process, yet this person managed to slip through their interview process. On the other hand our approach to just talk about programming in general terms seems to spot this type of candidate pretty quickly.

One of our most used questions is to ask people to tell us about something they don't like in a language or tool (one the candidate is very familiar with or enjoy using). It's pretty hard to imaging even a senior Java who doesn't have some pet pew about the language.

> No, but I do expect any reasonably competently run company to figure out that the person they hired isn't actually able to do their job, especially after 7 years.

Oh, they did. This person probably did not get paid as much as their peers. A great deal of compensation is discretionary.

Whether any decision-maker actually stood to benefit from removing this person from their position is another matter, however. Firings seem very uncommon, and layoffs depend on business conditions.

It's less that working at a FANG produces better devs and more that FANG can afford to be picky and so having worked there is a sign you passed a high hurdle once.

Kinda the same idea as having Harvard or Stanford as your alma matter. Most schools will teach you most of the same stuff, but those universities only take the "best". If your idea of "best" is similar, you'd take that Harvard also liked the person as a good signal.

Iant Harvard 10% best on scholarships and 90% children of rich and connected parents? Not total idiots, but still.

> Do you think working at a FANG would make you a better developer?

Yes...? I mean look at the complexity of the products these companies build?

I would expect if you've contributed on say Chromium or some EC2 networking layer that you're quite competent...is that somehow unreasonable?

These companies tend to pay multiples of typical "enterprise" CRUD developers because the work is that much more complex.

15 years ago fang devs were some of the best. Now it feels like all of fang is crumbling under tech debt and enshittifying executives, like AOL did.

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